Entrepreneurship Drives Economic Development in Post-Conflict States: Case Study of Israel and Rwanda

July 29, 2012 | 12:45pm

*This is a joint post with Rose Shuman, TED Fellow and Senior Fellow & Lecturer at the Society & Business Lab at USC Marshall School of Business

This is the last in a series of four blogs that highlight the importance of entrepreneurship in driving job creation and economic growth, the underpinnings of political stability and civil society. We’ve argued that thebenefits of entrepreneurship can be enjoyed in virtually every country, but are especially important in post-conflict states that are urgently trying to recover from what are usually deep wounds with soaring levels of joblessness.

For entrepreneurship to succeed governments must consciously enact policies that enable entrepreneurship ecosystems to flourish. In this final post on the role of entrepreneurship in post-conflict states, we look at the examples of Israel and Rwanda.

]]>http://rosesaritashuman.com/blog/archives/67/feed0US Department of State Live Webinar Broadcast Worldwidehttp://rosesaritashuman.com/blog/archives/61
http://rosesaritashuman.com/blog/archives/61#commentsThu, 10 May 2012 22:32:11 +0000Adminhttp://rosesaritashuman.com/blog/?p=61April 19, 2012, Washington, DC – Rose Shuman speaking with US State Department Foreign Service Officer Sarah Jessup on the government applications of Question Box. This webinar was broadcast live to all State Department posts worldwide.

Rose Shuman, founder of Open Mind-Question Box, speaks at the Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development conference. In this video, Rose talks about her passion for rural development.

This conference was co-hosted by the Indigo Trust, Omidyar Network and Institute for Philanthropy.

Rose Shuman designed Question Box to spread the benefits of the Internet in the developing world. At the push of a button, villagers could get answers to any query — from banana plant viruses to HIV/AIDS — in their local language. Now Rose is building software to scale the model and track callers’ question trends in real time.

You’ve dedicated much of your life to development issues. What got you started on this track?

My stepmother is Nicaraguan, and when I was 18, we all went to Nicaragua for Christmas. We took a side trip to the garbage dump of Managua and arrived at a giant mesa of garbage — the size of a multi-story apartment building. The garbage trucks there were like tanks with little claws on the wheels to claw themselves up the garbage. They would climb to the top, and then spill out a waterfall of garbage. Boys and men immediately began scrambling all over it, clawing through it. There was a community of about 1,000 people who literally lived in the trash dump.

I jumped out of the truck and sank into the garbage — I was wearing boots – and I saw a naked syringe by my feet. Then I noticed that all those boys only had cheap plastic flip-flops on their feet.

I think that people tend to have formative experiences between the ages of 17 and 21 — that trip was mine. I couldn’t really reconcile what I had seen in Nicaragua with my life in suburban Washington, D.C. So I spent the next six or seven years actively trying to understand why that world existed, and why my world existed. That involved me spending a lot of time living in places like Tamil Nadu, India, in an orphanage, and running a school in Honduras in a fishing village for half a year. I also spent time with the UN in refugee camps in Northern Uganda. Read full article

How social enterprise mirrors the ethos and lifecycle of a tech start-up

Sokunthea: There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

Rose: I think that a lot of social enterprise actually mirrors the ethos and lifecycle of a tech start-up: you have a small group of extremely passionate people dedicated to a compelling proposition. Social enterprises and tech start-ups have commensurate fail rates, as well. But the ones that work have a lot of potential. Read full article